A 15-person startup company called Robotica has the stated mission of “Developing innovative Artificial Intelligence tools that allow humans to live more and work less.” They have several existing products already on the market and a handful more in development. They’re most excited about a seed project named Turry. Turry is a simple AI system that uses an arm-like appendage to write a handwritten note on a small card.

The team at Robotica thinks Turry could be their biggest product yet. The plan is to perfect Turry’s writing mechanics by getting her to practice the same test note over and over again:

“We love our customers. ~Robotica”

Once Turry gets great at handwriting, she can be sold to companies who want to send marketing mail to homes and who know the mail has a far higher chance of being opened and read if the address, return address, and internal letter appear to be written by a human.

Testing Your Jekyll Site, The Ruby Way

Here at eSpark Learning, we use Jekyll to host our marketing site, https://www.esparklearning.com. Within eSpark Engineering, we love automated testing - most of our codebases require a passing test suite for all changes. As we add more javascript to our Jekyll site, we wanted to add a test framework that would give us real world tests - testing that the HTML was valid was no longer enough.

Acceptance Testing with RSpec, Capybara, and Selenium

To create real world acceptance tests for our site, we used a few technologies we were familiar with:

Farewell, App Store - The Web Strikes Back

Native apps became hugely popular for many good reasons - but many of those
reasons are no longer valid. Performance, offline capabilities, push
notifications, background workers, installation abilities, databases, and more
have fundamentally changed browsers - and it's time to start using them. Together, we'll
explore the current pros and cons of native versus web apps and take a deep
dive into real world offline web app. By breaking down it's internals, we'll
give an idea of what the web offers today and see just how awesome a truly
offline web app can be.